BLOG

Wonder Women

MUP’s list, meanwhile, is full of Wonder Women. Alongside backlist gems such as Patsy Stoneman’s book on Elizabeth Gaskell, and Janet Lee’s War Girls on the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, our history list boasts a wealth of biographies of pioneering female figures in the fight for women’s rights and in politics more generally, including Eva Gore-Booth, Evelyn Sharp, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, and most recently ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson.John Carter-Wood’s book The most remarkable woman in Englandfollows the case of Beatrice Pace, who became a media celebrity in the 1920s after being accused of the murder of her husband. The 1920s were an important decade for Wonder Women, and Lucy Bland examines this period in Modern women on trial: sexual transgression in the age of the flapper. For those interested in how women’s protests affected early twentieth-century politics, Jill Liddington’s book Vanishing for the Voteis a very readable account of the suffragette census boycott in 1911. It uses engaging and thoroughly human stories to bring this key moment in women’s history to life, and explains the political context along with the reasons why key figures decided against the boycott.

The festival will coincide with International Women’s Day, and our catalogue boasts lots of international Wonder Women. Alistair Thomson’s Moving stories looks at four British women who embarked on new lives in Australia. It’s a remarkable collaboration between author and four ordinary women who were extraordinary letters-writers, family photographers and memoirists recording in intimate detail aspects of everyday life and women’s experience that are often lost to history. Helen Boak’s Women in the Weimar Republictakes the First World War as a starting point, and explores the great changes in the lives, expectations and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight.

We’re very excited to be putting the finishing touches to Natalya Vince’s Our fighting sisters, which is based on oral interviews with Algerian women who were combatants in the fight to end French rule. We’ve also announced Eva Gore-Booth’s political writings in a single volume, edited by Sonja Tiernan, and a huge edition of Anne Clifford’s Great books of record, a wonderful 600-year history written by a fascinating seventeenth-century landowner and patron of the arts.

We’re very proud of our Wonder Women and we hope you’ll enjoy reading about them.

To celebrate the festival, enjoy this extract from the wonderful Vanishing for the Vote by Jill Liddington.

Jill will be speaking as part of the festival on Thursday 12th March. We hope to see you there!